Geistwulf
by DezoPenguin
Summary: Bloodrayne. In postwar Germany, Rayne is forced to confront the plots of a ghost from her past. Rated M for violence and language...have to stay true to the source material, right?
1. Chapter 1

_AUTHOR'S NOTE: In a recent issue of the Bloodrayne comic, "Red Blood Run No. 1," there's a bit of a continuity gaffe. The resurrected Jurgen Wulf, in explaining how he'd been an idiot in his past, states that "Even after we lost the war, I still proudly displayed his ridiculous symbol" ("his" in this case referring to Hitler). The problem is that Rayne finishes the first game by rendering Wulf down to dogmeat in 1938, before WWII had even broken out. So, unless Wulf was deliberately lying to his subordinate (unlikely) or just a bit confused in the head after sixty-odd years in Hell (understandable), there's a problem. What say we close that gap, shall we?_

_1947_

_Castle Gaustadt, Germany_

"They say this place was the haunt of vampires!" von Kempelen said. "Monsters even among their own kind!"

"Then you'd better hope they're all dead," snapped Gartner. He was in charge of the expedition, a burly, broad-faced American who had been with the OSS in the war and still worked in some similar capacity. The fellow was a spook through and through, thought Captain Larson.

There were just five of them: Gartner, Larson, Sergeants Donahue and Rice, and the German, von Kempelen. The latter wasn't military; he seemed to be some sort of local guide. Gartner treated the fellow like a kind of pet. His mention of vampires almost fit; Larson thought he looked like Edward Van Sloan in the movie _Dracula_, if one could imagine a cringing, nervous Van Helsing.

"Vampires?" Larson asked sarcastically. "The U.S. government has us out looking for vampires?"

Gartner gave him a contemptuous look.

"Don't be a wiseass, Captain."

"Then do you mind telling me what we _are_ looking for? It makes it kind of hard to find it if my men and I are just staring around blankly."

"Hell, I don't know either."

Larson stopped in his tracks.

"Putting it bluntly, sir, but what the fuck?"

Gartner laughed harshly.

"About time you said that. General Newcomb said you had brains, but I was beginning to doubt it."

Larson scowled.

"This is a fishing expedition, Larson. We're here to see what there is to be seen, because at least at one point there definitely was something."

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"Records, Larson, records. We've got people going over every scrap of paper the Nazis left behind. Look around at this place. Looks pretty damaged, huh?"

Larson nodded.

"Artillery barrage, maybe, or a bombing run."

"The latter, as a matter of fact--except that it might surprise you to know that it was the Luftwaffe that carried out the air strike, and in the winter of 1938."

"Hold on. The Germans bombed this place themselves? Before the war even started? Why?"

"That's the question we asked." By "we," did he mean the United States? Gartner and others personally? Some spook organization embedded in the Occupation forces? "The air strike was ordered under the authority of a paramilitary organization within the Nazi apparatus called the Gegengeistgruppe. GGG for short, so you don't sprain your tongue."

Donahue, who knew some German, spoke up for the first time since the mention of vampires.

"'Anti-ghost group'?"

"Yep. Pithy, ain't it? Turns out this GGG had some kind of operation running here at Castle Gaustadt, only things apparently got a bit out of hand."

"Out of hand? They _bombed_ the place?"

Gartner nodded.

"Interesting, isn't it? And from what we could tell, the GGG all but ceased to exist at that point. A considerable number of its officers, including the commander, Jurgen Wulf, were reported missing, believed dead."

Larson thought of the number of skeletons they'd passed on the way through the blasted-out structure. Many still wore their green Wehrmacht or black SS uniforms; their tailors had done a better job of holding up against rot and corruption than their flesh. He had a feeling, too, that the cleaning fire of the air strikes had done a good deal to obliterate traces of a greater horror.

"My question is, who was the GGG fighting? Some resistance group?"

"There was none left in Germany in 1938--not on the scale that it could fight a pitched battle with an armed force of this magnitude. Besides, if that was the case they'd have sent in the Wehrmacht or the SS to suppress it under their own aegis. The GGG, as its name suggests, had one primary mission: to research matters occult that could give Germany an edge in its quest for global domination."

Larson had to concede--though not out loud--that Gartner had a point.

"What, then?"

Gartner shrugged.

"Who knows?" He glanced at von Kempelen. "Vampires, maybe. The castle's owner was listed as a Count Voicu. That's not a German name."

Rice chuckled.

"Sounds Transylvanian to me!"

Von Kempelen blanched.

"I beg you, do not joke about such things!" The statement was, ironically, laughable, but he was so obviously sincere that no one laughed.

"What's that up there?" Donahue said, pointing.

"It looks like a tunnel, going into the mountainside," Larson said, studying the entrance through his field glasses. He glanced at Gartner. "Do you want to check it out, sir?"

Gartner nodded.

"No reason not to. They built this bridge for a reason--and that damn minefield at the bottom of the steps wasn't put in for laughs. GGG must have been covering their backs."

"All right, then."

They crossed the old wooden bridge. It was of sturdy, ancient construction, designed to support heavy wagonloads crossing and re-crossing the broad span, and had probably stood for centuries. Recent damage, though, made the crossing a harrowing experience; large chunks had been burned and blackened by fire, as if someone had tried to burn down the bridge, and in two places there were broad gaps where explosives or other massive assaults had torn holes in the surface. Donahue nearly slipped and fell when a burned patch gave way under his boot; Larson grabbed his coat and was able to haul him back just in the nick of time. His calf had been gouged by the splintered wood and it was necessary to clean and bandage the wound once they got across the bridge onto solid ground.

A heavy portcullis of medieval design hung above the tunnel, locked in the open position. Its spiked base looked like fangs set in the upper half of some giant maw, Larson thought, then snorted. Too much talk of occult mysteries and vampires could rot a man's brain.

The tunnel was not roughly hewn as he'd expected. Rather, it had stone-flagged floors and walls, looking for all the world like a corridor in a cathedral or late medieval palace. They passed more corpses along the way as the corridor spiraled inwards. All were Germans; the lack of bomb damage made it clear that some had been gunned down while others had apparently been sliced apart by swordlike blades. There wasn't a sign of a body that _wasn't_ German, which raised the question of what--or who, given their use of firearms--the GGG had been fighting. Not to mention why so many armed troops hadn't been able to accomplish anything against that enemy.

The corridor led through a large, round hall which had been the scene of a savage battle--one of the two columns had been somehow smashed in two and the other nearly so, which made Larson eye the ceiling. The pillars looked to be ornamental rather than load-bearing, but one never knew...

Only two corpses were to be found here, each with only one arm, but the corridor that descended from the far side was a veritable abattoir.

"Captain, something doesn't look right here," Donahue volunteered.

"There's a lot of things wrong about this place," Larson responded. It was beginning to sink into him now, the presence not just of the brutality and inhumanity of battlefield violence but of an underlying foulness, a genuine evil. The only thing he could compare it to was when his unit had liberated a concentration camp and he'd been overwhelmed by the obscenity, the degradation of human life. Although not on the same scale, Castle Gaustadt had something of the same feel to it, the sense that this was a place where people had abandoned their humanity, descended to the level of a beast, unfettered by a shred of conscience.

"No, sir--I mean, yes, sir, but that isn't what I meant."

"Oh?"

"Well, these dead men--they're Nazi soldiers, aren't they?"

"Judging by the uniforms, yes."

"Well then, sir, where are their guns?"

"Your man is right," Gartner said after a moment. "There's a couple of pistols, but nothing heavier than a sidearm. It's as if someone systematically stripped these men of their weapons as they passed through."

"But why? And who?"

"Maybe it was their comrades?" Rice volunteered. "Maybe they were fighting their way onwards and needed every gun, every magazine as they forced back whatever was here."

Larson considered the suggestion, then shook his head.

"If that's the case, then where's the enemy's bodies? If the Germans were forcing their way in, surely the opposition would have left behind some sign--and if they didn't leave anyone, then why give ground at all? No, there's something else."

"What do you think, then?" Gartner asked.

"Well, if you ask me, these were rearguards. I think somebody came in from outside and followed the Nazis into this hole. These men tried to stop that outside force and got their asses kicked."

Gartner tapped a skull with his foot; it was still wearing its helmet, strapped in place under its chin, but lay a good twenty feet from the nearest headless body.

"I won't argue that last part," he said wryly.

The tunnel turned, then opened up into a massive room. It was like the interior of a huge round tower a hundred feet high, except that it was entirely buried within the heart of the mountain. Von Kempelen and Rice shone their electric lanterns around, illuminating the floor.

"Well, I guess that explains where the guns got to," Donahue said, and indeed the floor was littered with them: pistols, submachine guns, even high-grade assault rifles. Larson picked one up, then checked the magazine.

"Empty," he muttered, discarding it. A few more proved the same. There was even a grenade launcher with an empty ten-shot drum and a couple of rocket launchers, sans rockets. "It's like a graveyard for dead weapons."

"Not for dead people, though," Gartner muttered. "What the hell were they shooting _at_? And if they fired this many rounds, where are the bodies?"

"Something else," Larson said. "For a room with a few dozen empty weapons sitting around, there's not a whole lot of bullet damage showing here. Whatever these guns were shot at, they hit." They'd been shot in this room, too. The amount of expended brass littering the floor was proof positive of that.

"So where's the bodies?" Gartner asked, half-rhetorically. "If something got shot in here, where's the corpses?"

"There's one, sir," Rice said as his light picked out something on the far side of the room. The group crossed over to an arch which led to a staircase going up, curving around the outside of the tower-like room.

The corpse lay half in, half out of the archway. It was clad in an elaborate uniform and an officer's cap lay a short distance away. The epaulets bore an unusual design, a three-armed variation of the swastika. Larson had already seen it here and there on other bodies around the castle, generally those of officers. The rank insignia suggested that this man was at the least a major-general, perhaps more.

"What's that mark, anyway?" Larson asked.

"The GGG's insignia," Gartner said. "Not sure of its origin, but it's all over their paperwork."

"I wonder what chopped this guy up?" remarked Rice. The description was nothing less than literal: the head had been severed, one leg separated at the knee, the other leg cut off at the hip, the bone sliced clean through. There was no sign of the left hand at all.

"It doesn't make sense. Who--or what--uses that kind of blade in combat these days? You'd need an axe or one of those big two-handed swords...hey, maybe a Japanese sword? Their officers still carried them now and again."

"Maybe." Gartner bent and picked something out of the dust. It was a silver monocle, a Y-shaped crack in the glass glinting in the lantern light. "Well, take a look at that."

"Is it significant?"

"It puts a name to our corpse." He bent and picked up the skull. "Gentlemen, say hello to Mr. Jurgen Wulf himself. Guess he isn't missing any more."

Von Kempelen shuddered.

"We should leave. This place, it is unholy. Surely you can feel it?"

"He might not be too far wrong, sir," Donahue concurred.

"Too bad Wulf, here, can't tell us what it was he was after; save us a lot of time, that," said Gartner, eying the skull. "Hell, he ought to be able to talk. The tongue's still in his head."

It was gallows humor, but accurate, too, as Larson saw now that he looked. Unlike the flesh on its face, which had rotted away, the tongue was still in place inside the skull. It was black and swollen, like the tongue of a strangled man, though leathery in look instead of wet. All in all it looked like some kind of loathsome worm or snake.

Suddenly, it acted like one, striking from out of the skull, shattering Wulf's jaw from within and scattering teeth. It struck at Gartner's face, burrowing into his mouth. Blood sprayed, and the Intelligence man screamed, the noise choked by the loathsome thing attacking him. The soldiers stood, stunned, riveted to their places, unable to believe what had just happened, unsure of what--if anything--they could do for the man. Gartner had fallen to the ground; he writhed and flopped like a landed fish, clutching at his face.

Finally, at last, he lay still.

"Mein Gott!" whimpered von Kempelen, cringing against the wall of the stairwell. "Mein Gott!"

"What the hell was that?" Donahue said. "Some kind of leech?"

"I don't want to find out," said Rice. He was trembling, a combat-hardened veteran shaking like a leaf.

Larson drew his sidearm, the butt of the .45 warm in his grip.

"We can't just leave him here, which means we have to kill that thing." He bent over, keeping the gun extended between himself and Gartner's body, making sure the barrel was pointed squarely into the open mouth. Donahue's description of the thing as a leech might not have been too far off; Larson could see where it quivered inside the blood-spattered pink hole as if it had rooted itself where Gartner's own tongue had been. It was freakish, though; no animal struck like that.

Suddenly, Gartner sat up. Larson gasped aloud, his hand jerked from nerves and the gun went off. Fortunately, the movement of the apparent corpse had taken it out of the line of fire and the bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the stone floor. Gartner's left arm came up, fastening on Larson's wrist in a bone-crushing grip, twisting the gun away from the spook's body.

"Hell, Gartner, I thought you were dead," Larson tried to explain, though he supposed in Gartner's position he'd have acted fast to prevent a second shot, too.

"He is."

Gartner's right hand came up even as he spoke, his own pistol in it. He fired twice, blowing the top of Rice's skull off. He turned, firing again, the bullets thudding into Donahue's body, taking out the second sergeant. Von Kempelen screamed and ran for the exit, but Gartner shot him in the back, sending the German pitching forward onto his face.

"I must say, however, that his body will serve most excellently to replace my own."

The words that came from the bloody mouth and writing black tongue were clear and precise, not at all the words of a man in pain. They were not Gartner's words, though. This voice had a strong German accent and an arrogant, supercilious tone not at all like Gartner's deep, forceful one.

Larson fought, then, fought for his life. His boot lashed out at the thing's midsection even as he reached with his left hand for the gun he held in his trapped right fist. The shock of his kick ran up his leg but had no apparent effect on the monster in Gartner's shell. With a twist of his arm the thing flipped the captain back against the stone wall, driving the breath out of him. It leveled the .45 at Larson while he fought to regain his senses, but the weapon clicked empty.

The thing in Gartner's body rose to its feet. The flesh of its face quivered, rippled as if it was trying to reshape itself in ways human muscles could not follow. It sighed as it approached the stunned soldier, as if it regretted having to lower itself to such crudities, then methodically used the barrel of the spent weapon to beat Larson's skull in.


	2. Chapter 2

_1948_

_Munich_

Rancid drool streamed between yellowed, hooked fangs to splash on the pavement as the beast swayed its wolflike muzzle back and forth. Talons the size of a man's thumb gouged furrows into the street.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you manners?"

Rayne did not sound impressed with the lycan's display. She didn't look impressed, either. Her appearance was more suited to an attitude of defiance: short red hair, blazing green eyes, tight red-and-black leather that clung to extremely generous curves, spike-heeled boots whose four-inch heels actually _were_ spikes of sharpened steel, and three-foot blades strapped to a girl's forearms didn't lend themselves well to a pose of "cringing in fear."

She confused the lycan. In its wolfish form, its brain was consumed by perverted, bloody instincts, to hunt and stalk prey. It expected its meat to run, expected to chase the prey and bring it down with slavering jaws. It didn't expect prey to fight back. Confusion buzzed like a hot wire in its brain, and like virtually any emotion for the werewolf it was converted into a burning desire to rip apart the object of that emotion. It growled deep in its throat, then with a powerful surge of its hind legs, it jumped at her.

Again, though, Rayne surprised it. Even as it hurtled towards her, she was jumping, arcing her body forward. Her hand planted on the back of its spine between the shoulder blades, she used its body as a springboard to somersault over the werewolf so she landed cleanly on her feet while it cannoned into the iron pole of a street light.

"Bet that had to sting, huh?" Rayne sallied.

Mythology suggested there were certain effective ways to kill a lycan. Wolfsbane--a plant also called monk's-hood or aconite--was said to be toxic, and of course there were the classic silver bullets or other weapons crafted of the moon-metal. Rayne, though, wasn't much for mythological subtleties. She was a direct woman who preferred direct solutions, and she'd found that slicing the monster up into bite-sized chunks usually was effective to solve supernatural problems. It lacked a certain elegance, but what was a girl to do?

While the lycan shook off the effects of the impact, Rayne flicked her blades around, swinging them from their carrying position against her forearms to their ready pose, the hinge connecting them to her bracers guiding them so the handles came right into her palms. The handles weren't hilts like a sword, but off the blades' back edges like a _tonfa_ baton. It offered her a remarkable ease of control over the weapons for slashing, thrusting, or parrying attacks.

"So, are we going to do this or what?"

The werewolf lunged at her, sweeping its right arm up and around in a massive roundhouse arc designed to hammer its fistful of talons through her body. Driven by the lycan's inhuman strength, the swipe was faster than any human could dodge--but then again, Rayne wasn't human. She ducked, rolling forward while extending her right arm, and its blade sliced across the lycan's chest and along its side, cutting through fur and belts of muscle, scraping along its ribs. The scent of spilled blood perfumed the air, making Rayne's nostrils flare eagerly.

Rayne planted her feet and pivoted her body, bringing her left blade around as the lycan passed her by. Unable to stop its momentum, it left itself completely open for her blade to shear through the bunched muscles of its shoulder and back. The werewolf yowled in pain as it scrambled away, then turned back.

A natural animal, or a thinking human, would have taken the hint. The werewolf had been stung twice, was up against an enemy as fast or faster than it was, an enemy that had wounded it while remaining unhurt. The smart move was to run, but the killing lust was on it, staring redly out of the lycan's wildly rolling eyes as they circled one another. It knew nothing but the urge to slay, wouldn't stop coming until it was rendered unable to keep fighting.

That suited Rayne just fine.

It charged in again, too blood-crazed for anything that resembled strategy, this time sweeping in with both arms as if to bear-hug her or squeeze her head between the enormous paws. This time Rayne didn't dodge aside but stayed in the monster's direct path. Instead, she dropped into a crouch, and while its talons passed harmlessly overhead she thrust upwards, spearing the tips of both blades through the lycan's chest. Rayne's own strength combined with the raw force of its charge to drive it fully onto the blades, stopping only when Rayne's fists slammed into its fur, the blade-points spearing out of the werewolf's back.

Rayne pushed herself erect, standing up while lifting the impaled beast overhead, then turned and flung it. The lycan slid off her blades, flying to crash into the brick wall of the nearest building. Rayne smiled, sensing the kill as she pressed the attack. The werewolf's next snarl of rage was half-choked by blood from its punctured lungs, and it was unable to keep her from forcing its arms aside with slashing, wounding blows. With its defense beaten down, Rayne punched her left blade up in an uppercut, skewering its muzzle from beneath and forcing the werewolf's head backwards. This opened up its throat to attack and Rayne took the opportunity, carving open the werewolf's neck to the spine. Gouts of blood sprayed as the massive body crashed to the ground where it twisted and thrashed for nearly a minute as its life ebbed away.

Only after it had stopped moving did the outlines of its body flex and ripple, shrinking down into the naked form of a man in his mid-twenties. In death, it was free of its bloodlust.

"That makes one of us, at least," Rayne said as her own system began to relax, the killing fever leaving her. In her way she was no less a monster than it--as a _dhampir_, half human, half vampire, the lust for violence, the predator's urge was in her as well, alongside the red thirst for human blood. Unlike the cursed freak she'd just destroyed, though, her mind was her own. Rayne could choose what to unleash her blood rage on--and so far as she'd found, there was never any shortage of mortal or supernatural horrors that she could let the demon out of its bottle against and still sleep like an innocent lamb.

Maybe, she thought, that was why she still kept up her association with the Brimstone Society even though her patron, Professor Tremain, was dead, his corpse burnt to ash in the explosion that had consumed Rayne's devilish father. Its work in fighting unnatural horrors guided Rayne to a steady stream of creatures like the lycan, things that while fighting she could let herself go, give the vampire side of herself free rein without worry.

Of course, with that opportunity came burdens, obligations. Things were never all just one way when dealing with people, especially people like Brimstone, who had gone much deeper into areas most sane human beings tried hard to avoid.

Rayne dealt with one of those obligations by spending several minutes on a public phone waiting for the operator to put through an international phone call. Postwar telecommunications weren't at their best, and these things still took time. Ordinarily she'd just have reported to the local chapter, but there wasn't a local chapter--not after the werewolf had gotten through with them.

Finally, the operators managed to put the call through.

"Hello?"

"It's me," Rayne said.

"Rayne?" The voice was deep and male, the kind of voice that went well with giving orders to secret agents. This one was American; Brimstone was nothing if not eclectic.

"Yeah. It's done."

"The locals?"

"Dead, all six of them. You boys are slipping; I didn't think one werewolf would give them that much trouble."

The voice was silent for a long moment, making Rayne wonder if she'd pushed things a little too far with the wiseass attitude. Authority figures didn't much impress her, but now and again she was a little too eager to make the point.

"No," the voice said at last. "No, it shouldn't. Not all of them. It lends credence to their report, though."

"Report?"

"It arrived by messenger the day after we sent you out to investigate, a coded packet sent by Brimstone's Munich chapter. They were on to something, organized occult activity."

"You think the werewolf wasn't just a random attack. Someone set the lycan on them, someone with knowledge of Brimstone's activities."

"Exactly." There was another pause, making Rayne wonder if he was conferring with someone else. "Rayne, we'd like you to look into this further. If it's reached the stage where someone is willing to snuff out six lives at once rather than risk exposure, then time is of the essence."

"All right. Besides, I said I'd investigate whatever made the Munich chapter go out of contact. If someone made that lycan attack, then they're as responsible for the deaths as it was. I do so hate to leave a job half-finished. What's my next step?"

"You'll need the information the chapter sent to us. By fast train we'll have it to you tomorrow night. And, Rayne?"

"Yeah?"

"Watch your back."

-X X X-

The man was big, well over six feet tall and broad across the shoulders. His hair was jet black, a wild shock of it, together with a bristling beard and moustache. Between thick, fleshy lips his bright white teeth gleamed in the firelight, looking sharp, almost pointed.

"Ja?" he said into the telephone receiver. "Gut." He set the instrument down, then turned to the other man in the room.

"You were right, Commander," he continued to speak in German. "The Brimstone Society learned something before we put a stop to their activities."

"I am not surprised, Hessler." The other man adjusted his monocle slightly. "For all their proclaimed altruism, these men understand the way of the hunt. They are not sheep to be led, but rather wolves who must be destroyed before they threaten the flock."

"Shall I take steps?"

"Oh, most definitely. Is that not what the shepherd does when his flock is threatened? That is what we are, Hessler. We raise and protect the flock. We cull from its breeding those who are weak and unfit to pass on their flawed genetics through the race. And when there is a threat from outside it is not with cruelty but as a simple matter of duty and sound policy that we crush it utterly and without mercy."

--

_NOTE: I've always thought calling werewolves "lycans" was a bit...precious...for my taste, but since the creatures aren't in the games at all I've used the term based on the comic issue, "Lycan Rex."_


	3. Chapter 3

Steam hissed up from the warm undercarriage of the train through the frozen night air, so that the passengers descended through veils of mist like living shadows. Rayne found it easier to watch them not as people, but as a vampire would, by watching the auras of the living. Her supernatural vision did not make their features any clearer, but at least there was no way their presence could be cloaked in the steam and fog.

Rayne wasn't usually this jumpy; she could only assume it was because the Brimstone contact knew her but she didn't know him. Waiting for him to approach her was a little too much like being hunted for her taste; it made the back of her neck itch. Rayne could all but feel her vampiric instincts telling her to reverse the trap, seek a strategy where she could identify her stalker and ambush him.

She didn't do any of those things, of course, but she wanted to, and it annoyed her that she did.

"I guess there's a reason," she muttered under her breath, "why vampires aren't any fun at parties."

"I guess that depends on if you're a guest or the refreshments."

The speaker stepped out from around the corner of the building Rayne leaned against, making for two surprises. The second was the fact that the Brimstone emissary whose throat Rayne had seized by startled reflex was a young woman around twenty-five. Females--female humans, at least--were rare among the society's ranks.

Her face was rapidly turning red, and she pointed at Rayne's hand while making little mewling noises. The dhampir let her go, and the woman gasped for breath, rubbing the reddened imprint on her throat.

"Do you greet all your friends like that?"

"You're alive, aren't you?"

"Point, that."

"Here's a handy tip: don't sneak up on anyone or anything with fangs unless you mean to kill them."

"I'll keep it in mind. I'm Dianne Warner; Brimstone sent me."

She extended a hand, which after a few seconds Rayne shook. Dianne was pretty, around five-five, with her blonde hair cut short and straight to just brush her shoulders. She wore a white blouse, brown slacks, and a tan wool topcoat that owed more to warmth than fashion. A practical woman. Even her boots, though stylish, had flat heels.

"Rayne. You had something for me?"

She patted the satchel slung over her left shoulder.

"Right here." Her voice held a faint German accent. "Let's go somewhere where we can talk."

"Somewhere" turned out to be a corner booth at a beer-hall that catered largely to working-class laborers. A drawn curtain kept off the attention two _Frauleins_ without a man could expect. They'd ordered two beers, and since Rayne's thirst had nothing to do with anything cold and fermented Dianne had claimed the dhampir's brew once she'd polished off her own. A forthright girl, Dianne.

"According to the report," Dianne told her, "before it was wiped out the Munich chapter had focused its attention on four individuals. You'll see why in a second."

"I'm sure."

"First off, Erich Riber." She set a photo down, a hawklike man in his fifties with the aristocratic bearing of a _Junker_. "Of noble birth, he made millions as an industrialist and can only have escaped classification as a war criminal through massive bribery or colossal incompetence. Of more interest, however, is the fact that Schloss Riber's occult library was considered the equal of any collection in Europe before the outbreak of war."

"Sounds like someone I'd like to meet over dinner."

"Then we have Oberst Wilhelm Mittel." Even the immaculate black of the SS uniform on the colonel in the picture could not lend the short, dumpy man with thinning hair and spectacles any presence. "The quintessential mad doctor, who performed experiments at Dachau that were apparently designed to identify the insane--by which I mean anyone who could hold his stomach while watching them."

She took a gulp of beer, as if to wash a vile taste from her mouth.

"Among the alleged subjects of his research was lycanthropy. Without basic considerations of decency and humanity to restrain him, he became, it is thought, one of the leading experts. The werewolf you destroyed strongly suggests that our suspicion of Colonel Mittel's involvement was dead on."

"Charming. I'd love to meet him across a dissection table someday."

Dianne flashed her a grin.

"You have such a way with words, Rayne."

"It's a gift. What about the last two?"

"These should interest you more." The next man was a bearded fellow who looked like he wasn't quite sure if he was supposed to be a human being or a bear. "Herr Konrad Hessler. Initially with the army, he was transferred to a special unit of the German military just before the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936."

Rayne glanced at the photo again. There it was: the three-armed swastika-like symbol that was her father's personal emblem, a symbol that had been adopted by the Nazi apparatus he'd supported, Jurgen Wulf's Gegengeistgruppe.

"GGG," she said grimly. "I didn't know I'd missed anyone."

"Hessler broke his leg two weeks before the mission at Old Gaustadt. He didn't make it onto your target list because he was on a sickbed in Berlin at the time you were putting paid to Wulf and the relics of Beliar. With the GGG functionally destroyed, he dropped off our radar in 1938, only to resurface now."

Rayne smiled.

"I hate loose ends. It'll be a pleasure to tie up this one."

"If that's a pleasure," Dianne said with a wicked grin, "then this last one will be a positive ecstasy." She set the last photo on the table and Rayne hissed with indrawn breath.

"Another dhampir?" she said eagerly.

"I'm impressed; you spotted it at once. Yes, another dhampir, and yes, another one of your half-siblings. He calls himself Klaus, without a last name, and seems particularly fond of that unusual weapon of his, a chain with a three-pronged blade on the end--well, that and the largest firearms he can carry."

Dianne continued on with more details on Klaus's life history, but Rayne was barely registering the sound, let alone the meaning. _A child of Kagan_. One of the monsters he'd tried to make of her. She'd missed her chance to kill her father when he'd died in the flames, but she wouldn't miss his family. If it took her a century, she'd make certain that everything he'd built, every drop of his blood, every goal he'd schemed and murdered to achieve was expunged from the earth, so not a trace would be left to prove he'd even existed.

And she'd start with the bald-headed, tattoo-faced dhampir known as Klaus.

"Where?" she asked.

"Excuse me?"

"_Where is he?_"

Dianne blinked.

"I thought...didn't I just say...?" She glanced at her beer as if wondering if she was drunker than she ought to be after only one and a half, then shook her head. "Anyway, the reports are that these people are gathering at an estate called Riber Haus. Apparently it once belonged to a branch family related to Erich Riber." There was a map in the file; Dianne shuffled it to the top of her stack. "Unfortunately--"

She didn't get to explain what was unfortunate about it; the crash of the beer-hall's front door being kicked open cut her off. Rayne peered through the narrow gap in the curtain and saw that four men had come in. _Armed_ men, openly carrying light-frame submachine guns.

"Where's the redheaded bitch?" barked the leader, distinguishable by the red-and-black bandanna tied around his neck.

"Shit!" Rayne cursed. Her blades were back in her room, since most people didn't walk around with two three-foot carving tools in a country under military occupation.

A weaselly man at the bar pointed a trembling finger at Rayne and Dianne's booth. As a thank-you, one of the gunmen smashed him in the face with the stock of his SMP34. "Cowardly scum," the thug sneered as the weasel toppled off his stool spitting blood and teeth.

The others turned their guns towards the booth. Rayne, even with her supernatural speed, barely had time to slip prone beneath the table before the bullets began to thud into wood and plaster and shatter glass. Dianne was already there, having ducked when the question was asked.

"Only one way out of here," Rayne murmured to her.

"Suits me," her Brimstone contact said, displaying a P-38 she'd been carrying under her coat.

Screams and stamping feet told Rayne that the customers were getting out while the guns weren't firing at _them_. When the guns fell silent and she burst from cover, the beer hall was deserted but for the four killers.

That made things nice and simple.

She was on the first one in an instant, her left hand seizing the gun barrel, wrenching it out of the would-be killer's grip. Her right hand came up under his chin, the heel of it breaking his jaw and snapping his neck from the force of it. The two men to her victim's left were still fumbling with their guns, trying desperately to insert fresh magazines. The fourth man, though, was a different story. He was the one who'd beaten the informer for his cowardice, too busy with that to join the fusillade. His submachine gun still had bullets, and he fired as Rayne lunged at him. She was fast, but even as she hit him, lifting him off his feet his finger was on the trigger, and bullets scored her side, one punching through her abdomen just above her left him and the second gouging the meaty part of her thigh.

Feeling the pain like cold spears in her flesh, Rayne screeched in anger and slammed the thug down onto the bar. Keeping the minion pinned with her right hand, she raised the SMP34 and drove its barrel down like a vampire hunter's stake, skewering the thug's heart and impaling the gun three inches into the wood, stapling the corpse to the bar.

That left two would-be killers--or, Rayne realized as she swiveled around, it left one, as Dianne fired her pistol twice and a gunman dropped, skull punctured from two head wounds. That just left the leader. He'd managed to get the fresh magazine in place and jacked back the bolt to chamber the first shell, a wild light of triumph in his eyes, when Rayne pounced.

When it came to living and dying, Rayne was more like her human half than her vampiric. Though supernaturally tough, she wasn't invulnerable to any kind of weapon. Bullets, blades, clubs, fire, all these were quite capable of injuring or killing her. It took more doing, but she'd go down without enemies having to break out the wooden stakes and holy water (not that the latter would do anything to her, anyway). Where the vampire part came in was how she healed that damage.

Grappling the killer, Rayne ripped away the bandanna and buried her fangs in his throat. A hot gush of blood filled her mouth and she swallowed greedily. Almost like magic it fueled her life; the undead part of her converted the blood to energy, making her wounds heal over in seconds when ordinarily it would have taken days. Rayne gulped greedily at the sweet, sticky flow until the pulse slowed and she was holding nothing but a corpse. Casually, she dumped the body.

"Wouldn't it have been better to keep one for interrogation?" Dianne asked critically.

Rayne wiped traces of blood from the corners of her mouth.

"What would be the point? We know who sent them, and pussyfooting around with thugs and minions won't get the job done. You were about to tell me that you know where the bosses were meeting anyway, right?"

"Well, yes," Dianne admitted, gathering up what the hail of gunfire had left of her materials. "There's a problem, though. Riber Haus is on the very eastern edge of the country, near the Polish border. In other words, to get to these Nazi remnants, you'll have to travel for miles through Soviet-occupied territory."


	4. Chapter 4

Rayne had to admit, the girl from Brimstone was sometimes useful to have around. Dianne's talents, it seemed, ran to procuring false papers and a knowledge of Russian.

"Not that you couldn't handle the border crossing on your own," she told Rayne during the drive, "but given that you have one enemy ahead of you, there's not much point in picking a fight with the Red Army as well."

"I don't know. At least the color would fit," Rayne had responded, but the truth was she appreciated avoiding unnecessary fights. It wouldn't do to get killed by some lucky shot from a Soviet rocket launcher, not when there were other people out there who were definitely in need of killing. She'd hate to miss a chance at her half-brother.

_Besides_, she thought, surveying the carnage, _it looks like someone's doing a good enough job slaughtering the Red Army _without _me._

They'd arrived at the village of Einzbern just after sunset. It was the last outpost of civilization on the way to Riber Haus, and they'd decided not to stop. If a bunch of Nazi remnants were gathering at the manor, then they'd be stupid not to have eyes and ears planted in the village. Instead, they skipped Einzbern entirely and proceeded to the army checkpoint up the road.

And found a massacre.

There had been, as best Rayne could tell, eight soldiers on duty. She could be off by a couple in either direction, since only three of the corpses were intact. If some ambitious coroner wanted to play medical jigsaw puzzle, he'd probably find some parts missing.

The blood was fresh. It steamed in the chill, and made Rayne's teeth ache in their sockets.

"Get back in the car," she told Dianne.

"Wait, you think I'm going to close myself in? I'd be trapped!"

"These guys had machine guns." The fresh bullet holes pockmarking the waypost walls testified that they'd tried to use them. "You think mobility on your own two feet is going to count for much against something that can cut through eight soldiers like this?"

Dianne swallowed uneasily.

"You have a point."

"Right, so go get in the car and when the trouble starts, drive away."

"What about you?"

Rayne flashed her a grin whose edge wasn't entirely on account of the fangs.

"I'll catch up."

Dianne looked at her with a strange kind of emotion in her eyes. What was it, apprehension? Disquiet? Then she nodded.

"All right."

She turned and headed back towards the car.

Rayne snapped her blades into position, the handles settling comfortably into her hands.

"Well, then?" she shouted into the wind. "Are we going to do this or what?"

Apparently they were. They rose from cover, behind rocks and tufted grass: two more lycans, one with brown fur and one gray with a white belly, both liberally splashed with the red of their recent victims. As she'd guessed by the freshness of the bodies, the killers were still close by. Indeed, it looked like they'd been lurking in wait. _Very unwerewolflike_, Rayne thought. _Looks like Colonel Mittel found a way to get them to take at least a few orders._

They snarled and growled at her, making threatening gestures with their claws, but didn't charge. That was also strange, but she understood it at once. Rayne sidestepped to her right while swinging her left-hand blade up and back. The third werewolf's hurtling body hit the edge with tremendous force, its own leap adding to the power of Rayne's arm. Blood spattered as the thing was nearly sliced in two, and when the werewolf hit the ground it did not move.

"How stupid do you think I am?" Rayne asked. "Or do you just figure I'm so deaf I can't hear a three-hundred-fifty-pound sack of fur stomping around behind me?"

The death of their comrade didn't seem to dissuade the two other werewolves. Quite the contrary, the fresh-spilled blood seemed to excite them, a reaction Rayne could appreciate. Their muzzles flexed and twisted, snarling, and then they sprang.

In different directions.

The brown lycan, as expected, hurtled at Rayne, but the gray did not. Instead, it bounded away to its left.

_The car!_ Rayne realized. It was after Dianne.

She didn't have time to worry about that, then, not with three hundred and fifty pounds of wolven fury upon her. Blades met claws with a ringing clash; this one had brains enough not to impale itself with a flying leap. Though it clawed and snapped at her, it wasn't the machine of pure aggression other werewolves she'd met had been. Rayne's blades nicked and cut it, but it refused to give her an opening she could exploit for a quick kill.

The car's engine coughed, then roared to life. Over the lycan's shoulder Rayne saw it move, begin to ascend the mountain road while building up speed.

Then she saw the gray lycan leap for the car and land on the roof, its talons punching through the thin metal to act as handholds. No, more than that: it was ripping away the roof like it was peeling back the lid on tinned sardines.

Suddenly, pain exploded through the left side of Rayne's head; the sight had distracted her enough that she'd left an opening for her werewolf foe. The blow staggered her; Rayne reeled back dizzily, barely missing having her throat torn open by the lycan's jaws.

She was in trouble now, she realized. It was done with the defensive fighting and on the attack now that it had her at a disadvantage. Desperate times called for desperate measures, so Rayne called up all her fear and rage, all her blood-fueled power, and put it into one last-ditch attack, chopping down hard with both blades together.

In a way, it was the same exact thing as had gotten the ambushing werewolf killed. Had she missed, she'd have been left utterly exposed and defenseless. The difference was, Rayne had been aware and dodging, while the lycan wasn't. It was trying to rip her open when the dhampir's blades sheared down, carving through its arms and deep into its torso. After a couple of twitches, it was dead.

Rayne sucked in air, trying to gather herself. Her vampiric healing abilities were rapidly recovering from the blow she'd taken, but there were limits to what they could do without fresh blood. That was something to worry about later, though. She ran towards the road and soon located where the mutilated car had come to rest, its nose buried in the ditch at the outside of a curve. Worried about what she'd find inside, she approached, but it wasn't until she actually looked that she realized that there was no bloodsmell to herald a gory death from the werewolf or the crash.

In fact, there was nothing at all. Alive or dead, Dianne wasn't there to find.

Rayne cursed loudly and inventively, then followed the road back towards the checkpoint until she found the spot where the lycan had abandoned the car. It had left tracks when it landed, the tracks of its hindpaws only, so it had been a controlled landing. It had jumped, not been thrown from the car, and probably had taken Dianne with it.

Had she been alive or dead, Rayne wondered? There had been no blood spilled in the car, none on the ground. Dianne hadn't been bleeding and from Rayne's experiences with werewolves that meant she was probably alive. Lycans were brutal, messy killers. They wouldn't cleanly break a victim's neck when they could tear the whole head off.

_Then again_, she thought, _since when do they take_ hostages? Mittel's work was positively dangerous, if he was responsible for turning werewolves into a force actually capable of using their superhuman abilities intelligently.

A better question was, what did they want Dianne for? Information? Maybe, but they hadn't tried interrogating the Munich branch of Brimstone before slaughtering them. As a tool to manipulate Rayne? Also a maybe, but it gave Rayne credit for a softer heart than anyone ought to suspect she had.

She shook her head. Ultimately, it didn't matter why the lycan had kidnapped Dianne. Since it had been so against its natural instincts to do so, there had to be a definite purpose behind it. Anything beyond that was pure guesswork. She'd find out in time. The important thing now was to keep going.

Rayne followed the tracks upward, moving quickly but with caution, not sprinting. The broad spacing of the wolf-prints indicated that the lycan had been running, and it was faster than Rayne at a dead run despite her superior speed and reflexes. Since there was no chance of actually chasing it down, there was nothing to be gained by reckless pursuit.

Conveniently, she realized almost at once, the werewolf was heading up the hill towards the dhampir's original destination. She was almost disappointed. Dianne clearly hadn't been snatched to lure Rayne away from her mission and onto some prepared killing ground.

"I could have saved you the trouble, boys; I was going there anyway," she said, then suddenly stopped in her tracks.

She been calling the incident at the checkpoint an ambush because she'd been jumped from behind, but it was more than that--it was the literal truth. It was beyond coincidence to assume they'd arrived just as the werewolves had finished cleaning out the Soviet soldiers for their own purposes; it had been a trap, set at the one place near Riber Haus where Rayne and Dianne would have had to stop. They'd killed the soldiers so they wouldn't interfere, and so their bodies would serve as a distraction.

Rayne didn't like that all--and when she added in the gunmen in Munich who'd tried to perforate the two women, she liked it even less.

The back of her neck itched. Somehow, some way, there were eyes on her, watching her every move.

Then she smiled, flashing her fangs.

_If that's the case, then I'll just have to put on a good show._

--

_NOTE: Yep, "Einzbern" is a _Fate/stay night_ reference. No particular meaning, just an Easter egg for anyone who spotted it._


	5. Chapter 5

With its high turrets and peaked gables, Riber Haus looked like something out of a nineteenth-century Gothic romance or a Frankenstein movie, two forms of entertainment Rayne could do without. The crumbling manor was perched on a cliff's edge not for atmosphere, anyway, but for defense in times of war; before Bismarck the German principalities had always been a nervous place to own property.

While she was certain things would come down to it sooner or later, Rayne wasn't ready for the direct approach just yet. Walking right up to the front door was a good way to end up as a target.

_On the other hand, the back door isn't exactly...easy_, Rayne thought as she clung to the cliffside. The dhampir's strength made a near-impossible climb into a merely difficult one, but it wasn't a cakewalk. More than once she found herself hanging on by her very fingertips to a "handhold" that was barely more than a rough patch, or having to drive the steel spikes of her bootheels into the rock face to generate a foothold. She wasn't giving up, though. She had an ally to rescue...and a brother to kill.

Rayne licked her lips. Motivation made things so much easier.

It was only a matter of three hundred feet or so before the rough stone of the cliff came to an end and she pulled herself up onto a strip of ground at the rear of the house. Erosion had been doing its work; the rear approach was no more than a ledge two feet wide at the broadest while in some places the cliff face had crumbled away to no more than an inch or two from the building. Eventually nature would do its work and Riber Haus would tumble over the side like it was being swallowed by the giant maw of the valley below.

_Presuming there's anything left to swallow after tonight_. Rayne was fairly hard on architecture as a rule.

Unlike the front of the manor, there were several windows on the rear side since the builders had no reason to fear attack from that direction. Rayne crept along the ledge, her back pressed to the cool stone wall until she came to one through which electric light--_the place must have its own generator since there weren't any wires_--streamed. Soviet palms must have been greased to let it go un-investigated; Rayne didn't bother to consider the hows or whys of it. It wasn't like she was some Sherlock Holmes with fangs.

She was about to break in through the window when the sound of voices from the other side of the glass caught her attention.

"Up and down, up and down," a man complained in German. "I swear, Hans, my feet will kill me faster than any of the doctor's little pets if I have to climb any more stairs. If it's not down to the laboratory, then it's up to the experiment chambers or the Commander's room."

"Careful you don't let him hear you; he'll probably try testing it out!"

What the first man might have answered, if anything, was lost in the crash of broken glass as Rayne launched herself into the room.

"Thanks for the directions, boys," she said, observing the two burly specimens of Aryan manhood that confronted her: six feet tall with rippling muscle displayed by short-sleeved white shirts and khaki trousers, square faces, and crew-cut blond hair. Of more relevance to Rayne were the holstered Mauz pistols they clawed at in fear.

Rayne flung her harpoon, a barbed throwing spike connected to her right wrist by a thin but strong chain. It thudded home in one man's torso, and seizing the chain in her left hand for additional leverage she swung the man like a game of snap-the-whip. The harpoon pulled free in mid-swing, but the man kept on going, right out the window. His screams trailed off as gravity asserted its dominion.

Wasting no time, Rayne sprang at the second man, seizing his arm and forcing it out so the gun barrel pointed away from her. He squeezed off a shot, which smashed into an old, dark-looking oil painting hanging on the wall.

"That wasn't very nice, Hans," Rayne said, and snapped his wrist. He gave a yelp of pain, then with surprising defiance spoke up.

"I'm not Hans; you flung him out the window, monster."

"Sorry; my mistake." Rayne snapped her right-hand blade into place and speared it through the man, up under his ribs through his heart and out his back. She picked up his dropped gun and checked it over. Not much in the way of stopping power and loaded with regular ammunition, but she took it anyway. It never hurt to have more firepower available.

She'd probably need it, too. Rayne wasn't exactly known for her covert intrusion style in any event, but in an old building like Riber Haus that single gunshot would have been heard. She was probably expected anyway, but it would have been nice to have kept them guessing for a little while.

_So where to now?_ Down sounded right; Mittel's lab was apparently in the basement and that probably meant holding cells for his subjects. Dianne might be there unless she was undergoing interrogation somewhere else in the house, and Rayne might learn something about what the Nazi remnants were up to. Cautiously, she moved on, looking for the stairs.

-X X X-

The dhampir sniffed the air experimentally, like a hunting dog. It was a good metaphor, thought Hessler. Wasn't the dhampir a beast, after all? His parentage polluted not even by the lesser races but by a subhuman freak, a monster?

"Blood," Klaus said. "Fresh blood. That shot was no accident."

"She's here, then?"

"Indeed."

"Then you'd better go find her."

Klaus cocked an eyebrow at the bearlike ex-GGG man.

"You are not going to rouse the guards?"

Hessler laughed harshly.

"And what good would that do? Now that half the country is in Western hands and the other half Soviet, it is not so easy to find men to do the scut work. We have better uses for them than to offer your sister a meal."

Klaus laughed.

"I see you have untapped depths, Herr Hessler. If you will excuse me, then?"

In the next instant the man was gone, vanished like a ghost in the time it took Hessler to blink.

-X X X-

The next man Rayne encountered she took alive. She'd been descending a twisting, stone-walled staircase when she'd heard footsteps from the corridor below. Pressing her back against the staircase wall, she allowed the man to pass her, then seized the back of his shirt, hauled him back into the stairway and slammed him face-first into the wall. Dropping her grip to his belt, she lifted him off the ground to deny him leverage: while she was immensely stronger and quicker than he was her _mass_ was only that of a normal human woman and he could fling her around with little effort if in a position where she couldn't oppose his strength with her own. Off his feet though, in the face of the dhampir's strength, he was essentially helpless.

Just in case he'd missed that point, she pressed the tip of a blade to his throat.

"Shout for help and you're dead. Try anything stupid and you're dead. Piss me off in any way and...you know. Understand?"

Her prisoner nodded.

"Good. Now, a woman was brought here tonight, within the last two hours, by one of Herr Doktor Mittel's werewolves. Where is she?"

The man's eyes rolled with panic.

"I...I don't know anything about a woman!" he babbled.

"You wouldn't be lying, would you?" She dug the blade in just a bit.

"No! No, dear God, it's the truth!"

"All right, then, where do you _think_ she'd be?"

"Dr. Mittel's lab?" he asked more than stated. "He keeps the werewolves penned up there."

"All right, then. How do I get there?"

"J-just take this hall. The stairs are three doors down. Take them down two flights."

_Two flights?_ Rayne wondered. She was already in the cellars. _What did they do, hollow out the cliff?_ Maybe they had; the Nazi war machine hadn't exactly been shy about carrying out major building projects.

"Thanks." She hadn't actually promised to spare his life if he answered her questions, but Rayne supposed killing him would be in bad taste. Besides, she might need directions again. She tapped his head against the stone wall hard enough to knock him out and stripped him of his gun, then proceeded on.

The stairs down were right where he'd said they were, so she decided to keep following the man's directions. She descended warily, careful of possible traps, and used her aura sense to check for ambushes. It was the latter ability that told her there was only one person, living or undead, on the other side of the iron-banded door at the base of the stairs.

_One-on-one. Works for me._

Rayne flung open the door to reveal a large, vaulted room. Banks of electrical equipment covered in dials, switches, and flashing lights lined two walls, with tables full of chemical apparatus covering the others. Large dissection slabs were free-standing in the middle of the room; laid out on one was a corpse. Rayne noted with surprise that she recognized the body: it was the werewolf she'd killed in Munich. She hadn't exactly left the man in good shape, but now he looked like Jack the Ripper had been after him.

The Ripper in question, hunched over the body with scalpel in hand, was the former SS scientist from Dianne's file, Wilhelm Mittel. The man was even more grossly fat than in the photograph; his fingers were like thick sausages clamped around the tiny knife and the puffy bulk of his face made his tiny, square-rimmed glasses look almost comical perched on his nose.

He looked up at Rayne's entry, which surprised her a bit as the hinges hadn't creaked and she'd kept her steps silent even on the stone-flagged floor. Mittel's face brightened at the sight of her.

"Ah, Agent Rayne!" he said in thickly accented English. "So good of you to come." His bulk, his happy voice, and his beaming face made him seem like somebody's favorite uncle--if you ignored the mad doctor's lab and the mutilated corpse. The bloody stains on his lab smock did nothing for his appearance, either.

"Dr. Mittel." She made a show of looking around. "Love what you've done with the place. Maybe I should start watching those Frankenstein movies just so I can tell if you're up on all the latest mad scientist fashions."

Mittel giggled like a schoolgirl.

"Ah, you make the joke, ja? But that is good! I am so happy you have come! Klaus will not let me study him, no, not even for a moment. It is very sad, that. But now you are here, and I will be able to learn so, so much from you!"

Rayne pointed one of the stolen automatics at the lunatic.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Dr. Mittel, but I think I've actually just found something I agree with my family on. We have a strict non-dissection policy."

Mittel giggled again. Rayne was really starting to find that sound creepy. The desire to just put a bullet into this madman and call it a day was nearly overwhelming.

But, she wasn't here for the fun of it.

"Enough with the playful banter," she said. "One of your walking hairballs brought a woman here sometime in the last couple of hours. Where is she?"

For some reason this seemed to strike Mittel as more funny than anything else Rayne had said. He broke into a positive fit of the giggles, until his belly quivered and shook, his face turned bright red, and he was forced to brace himself against the dissection table with one hand while he wheezed for breath.

"Hell with it," she said. "When they're this crazy, you can't get a decent interrogation going, anyway." Rayne pulled the trigger, the sound of the shot barely more than a loud snap in the huge laboratory. Mittel's body tumbled over as blood sprayed from the hole in the center of his forehead. _At least that's one off my target list._

There was a heavy steel door on the far side of the room which Rayne suspected led to cells for Mittel's more lively experiments. The massive bolts weren't fastened, though, suggesting that there wasn't anything at all that hazardous back there now. Rayne crossed the room and pulled the door open to reveal a long row of a half-dozen cells. It was a perfect place for Dianne to have been held, but a sweep of her aura sense revealed nothing alive in there.

_Damn._

A deep growl made her turn back into the lab. Mittel, seemingly untroubled by a bullet through the brain, was pulling himself to his feet. His glasses were gone and his eyes wild and staring, his smiling mouth bristling with dagger-like fangs. In the next instant his body had grown, swelled from merely fat into an immense mass of muscle. Drool spattered the floor from his lolling tongue. The shot hadn't hurt him because Mittel himself was the gray werewolf.

Rayne snapped her blades out into their ready position.

"Okay, I get the joke now, but you know what? It still wasn't that funny."


	6. Chapter 6

"Bad dog," Rayne chided. _Typical mad scientist_, she thought. _He couldn't resist testing his research out on himself._ "Don't you know you're supposed to lay down and play dead?"

The werewolf made a kind of roaring growl that sounded more like a bear than a wolf. It flexed its elongated fingers as if imagining what it might feel like to crush her flesh within them. The blood-crazed rage leering out of its red eyes reminded Rayne of why she never understood the fascination lycans seemed to hold for people. Why, she wondered, would anyone want to turn oneself into a berserk monster incapable of discerning between friend and foe? Yes, Mittel had obviously done something to improve the intellect of his breed, but why bother? There were other routes to superhuman strength, agility, and endurance that didn't involve liquefying one's brain.

Then again, it wasn't like Mittel had been the poster boy for rationality to begin with.

"What, are you just going to sit there and growl at me all night?"

That got him going. Rayne slapped her palm on top of the nearest dissecting table and swung herself up, meeting Mittel's charge with both spiked boots square in the face.

_Okay, so superhuman strength, agility, and endurance have their points_, she thought as the lycan reeled away. She followed it up with another attack, slicing down in a whirling strike. Her blade slashed through his bicep, spraying tainted blood, but he recovered fast, driving his other hand at her abdomen like a fistful of knives. She parried, but was rocked by the force of the blow; Mittel was stronger than the other lycans she'd had to put down recently. Rayne kicked it in the side and chopped down at Mittel's head, but the werewolf lunged its muzzle for her in the same movement so that she only clipped its ear. Its fangs closed hard on her shoulder, and with a twist of its neck it flung her across the laboratory. She hit one of the side tables, smashing through glass so that shards of chemical equipment bit and stung at her. The tiny wounds closed almost instantly, the shoulder nearly as fast, but Rayne could tell the healing process was taking its toll on her reserves.

_Lucky I didn't land in anything caustic_, she thought, getting back to her feet. A twinge from her shoulder reminded her it was also damn lucky that her vampire blood made her immune to lycanthropy. Baying at the moon just wasn't on her "to do" list.

The werewolf wasn't slowing down; it bounded towards her again, springing from table to table in a series of quick leaps. This time, though, Rayne was ready. She feinted high, as if she were going to use its own lunging momentum against it. Mittel swept its claws out to try and knock the blades away, but they were already gone, striking low at the lycan's legs, shearing into flesh and bone. The werewolf's left leg came off at the knee, and it botched the landing, crashing into the table. Wood splintered under its weight and Mittel smashed through, a shower of broken equipment sliding down to rain on the werewolf's back.

"That's it, Mittel. Now, sit!"

The monster roared, using the broken table to help pull itself into a clumsy, one-legged stance.

"All right, then, no treat for you."

It grabbed a chunk of the table and flung it at her, but Rayne leapt smoothly aside, then hit the wall feet-first and rebounded off it to come back at the werewolf from the side. Her blades slashed it hard in passing, then she landed, ducked a wild sweep of Mittel's claws, and drove her left blade upwards into the monster's heart. Blood spurted from its opened mouth; she must have sheared through a lung on entry. The monster thrashed and twitched, spewing blood and foam in its death throes.

"Turning Nazis into blood-crazed, berserk monsters. Who can tell the fucking difference?"

She helped Mittel along with a backhanded swipe of her right blade, decapitating the monster.

"Werewolves," she sighed. "If I have to fight one more of these damn furbags on this mission I swear I'm going to die of boredom."

"Well, we can't have that, can we, sister dear?"

Rayne whirled to see the shaved, tattooed dhampir from Dianne's file standing in the room's open door. The scent of the werewolf's blood flirted with her senses, melding with emotions the sight of the other dhampir had aroused.

"Klaus," she purred, and shot him a razor-edged smile. "I'm happy to meet up with you so soon. I was expecting to have to wade through a squad of Nazi goons before I got the honor of pruning the family tree."

The dhampir chuckled. He had that urbane, civilized, man-of-the-world attitude so many vampires tried to cultivate in between ripping people's throats out. It nicely complemented his black leather duster, while making Rayne's teeth ache and not from hunger.

"Really, Rayne, why we do try to be generous hosts, you are a trespasser here, not a guest. I hardly think it would be appropriate to offer you refreshments."

_Shit! The bastards actually thought this through._ It explained why there hadn't been a general alarm at the sound of the shot when she broke in, no hordes of machine-gun-toting minions filling the corridors. The GGG remnants knew who she was, who was coming after them. Rayne could leave a battle with humans in better shape than she started with if she got a chance to drain them, and unless they were packing grenades, rocket launchers, or other heavy artillery that didn't make good indoor toys that was exactly what would happen. The GGG had called back its snack food where she couldn't get at it and sent out Klaus instead--Klaus, who hadn't been fighting werewolves, climbing up cliffs, or healing bite wounds, and who had all the superhuman agility, strength, and toughness of a child of Kagan like Rayne herself.

"At least it's not another lycan," she muttered, and ripped out the two pistols while leaping into action.

Despite the pulp novels, human beings couldn't blaze away with two guns at once and expect to hit anything with any reliability. Coping with recoil and trying to deal with multiple aiming points at once stressed the body and brain both. Rayne, though, had no trouble with it; her superhuman strength kept the weapons on target and her unnatural senses let her aim accurately even as she flung herself through the air. Had she been firing at a human, she would have stitched ten rounds through his ribcage.

She wasn't firing at a human, though, but at someone with equal abilities. Even as she was drawing the guns, he'd sprung into the air as well, and all but one bullet found the floor or thudded into sparking machines, so all Rayne accomplished was to nick his calf.

Unlike a true vampire, bullets _could_ kill most dhampir. It was just a matter of putting _enough_ of them into a target to overload his or her supernatural healing abilities. The Mauz pistols wouldn't have been enough for that; the best Rayne had hoped for was to balance the scales a bit for her own earlier wounds. One flesh wound wasn't going to even accomplish that.

The Bergstein MP28 submachine gun Klaus's left hand had swung up from its shoulder sling beneath his coat was a different matter. They were eight feet away when he fired, Rayne torquing her body in midair so the full-auto stream sprayed past her abdomen so closely she could feel the wind from it. She lost herself in dilated perception, her mind processing sensory information so quickly it seemed as if time had slowed to a crawl. As their bodies neared she swung her arm down, releasing the pistol in mid-swing at his face as a distraction while her blade chopped towards the SMG and her other hand twisted, trying to catch him off guard with a few more shots. Klaus reacted to most of the threats, twisting as she had to avoid her bullets, lunging his head back to keep from getting the gun in the face, while his right hand came up with the three-pronged blade she'd seen in the photograph to slice at her shoulder. He'd overcommitted to the Bergstein, though, still trying to wrestle it up on target since he knew that emptying it into her would likely put her down, and so swung the barrel right into the path of Rayne's blade. The swipe tore the gun from his hand, sending it spinning away even as his weapon sliced the meat of her shoulder.

Rayne came out of dilated perception as she hit the ground--it ate into her energy reserves too fast for constant use--and spun to face Klaus, who'd come down just as cleanly on the far side of the room. Rayne dropped her remaining, now empty, pistol and brought her blades up into a ready position.

"Looks like we do this the old-fashioned way, then."

"As it should be. Vampires do not need human toys to make us strong." He licked the blood from the edge of his weapon. "Delectable. I look forward to savoring the rest."

"You know, Klaus, doing that kind of ruins that whole leading man vibe you had going there, and let me tell you, it's not an improvement." He scowled angrily and she added with a shrug. "I know, it surprises me, too. But you know what they say: things can always get worse."

The blade swept out at her in a sudden arc and Rayne had to backflip away to avoid it. She had a good look at it now: Klaus's weapon was a lot like her harpoon, only instead of a single blade there were three set at right angles, each a foot long and two inches wide at the base. The chain was heavier, stronger, and could no doubt be used as a weapon too in its own way. Also, the butt of the chain wasn't fastened to Klaus's body but swung free with a weight on it for balance and for use as a bludgeon.

Klaus spun his chain through the air in whirling arcs, sometimes attacking with the blade, sometimes the weight, sometimes with loops of the chain itself. The weapon seemed clumsy, but with his inhuman strength he could control it far better than a human, and its unusual construction made it unpredictable. In a battle between dhampir, being able to bring an attack from an unanticipated direction made for a decided advantage.

Rayne's major problem was that her blades were limited to hand-to-hand range while Klaus's chain-flail was not. She could dodge and parry all day, but without the ability to counterstrike the outcome was inevitable. He knew it as well as she did, which was why every time she tried to gain ground, Klaus sent out a flurry of attacks keeping her back even while he moved around the lab perimeter to maintain the distance. In weaponry, as well as energy reserves, he had a decided advantage.

_What I need to do_, Rayne thought, _is to change the rules_. The fight wasn't just her against Klaus, blade against blade. This wasn't an empty training arena, but a mad scientist's lab with smashed tables, shattered equipment, broken machines spewing sparks, even the occasional corpse.

_Yes!_

She had to get to the right spot or it wouldn't work, so she began to move laterally as well as trying to close the gap, working them both into position. Rayne took a solid shot in the ribs from the bludgeon end of the chain and didn't have to fake a stagger into one of the dissection tables, then did the one thing she knew would provoke an attack: she lunged straight at Klaus.

The blade was coming after her so quickly that she thought it might have been a follow-up to the strike instead of her rush. It threw off her timing, but she put on an extra burst of speed and grabbed the corpse of the man Mittel had been dissecting just in time. The blade thunked heavily into the meatshield--and stuck.

Rayne acted instantaneously, going into dilated perception as she flung the body backwards to keep the chain taut and pivoted her body up onto the chain, sliding along it, down the metal links towards Klaus. He whipped the bludgeon end up towards her but she struck it aside with her right-hand blade. Belatedly, he dropped the chain, letting it sag so she couldn't railgrind down it but by then it was too late, her momentum carrying her into him, her left blade piercing, then impaling, sliding through Klaus's body until her fist crashed into his solar plexus. He tried to defend himself, but the shock slowed him too much to prevent a second brutal stab. With the blades as levers, she pulled him in and buried her teeth in her half-brother's throat, savoring the gush of the delicious red slaking her hunger. Rayne barely realized that she'd slipped back into normal time, not because the battle was done but so she could taste more of the blood faster, until Klaus's body stopped twitching on her blades and he was just a drained corpse to toss aside.

Rayne wiped her face on the back of her glove. She hadn't found Dianne yet, but she'd taken out half her target list. _Not a bad start, and I've only cleaned out the basement_.

--

--

_NOTE:_ _You've probably already noticed, but I've been using the gun names from BR1 instead of real-world firearms; of course, those guns are in any event merely twisted names of genuine period firearms anyway (Mauz for Mauser, Leug for Luger, etc.)._

_While Rayne's Dilated Perception power is obviously a typical "bullet time" application, I'd have to add that its use in a vampire game actually seems completely "realistic." So often in movies and TV we see vampires moving at insanely superhuman speeds, vanishing from a room in an eyeblink and the like. Yet, if I tried to do that, my reflexes wouldn't allow me to (try moving around a house at a full-speed sprint--you'll overshoot doors, crash into things or people, have to jerk to a stop at the last second, and so on). It rather blows the whole vampire mystique if Count Dracula vanishes from a room in an eyeblink in an instant, then thuds into the wall outside the door because he was moving at 70 mph and he couldn't hit the brakes. Dilated Perception explains all that: the vampire mind is capable of processing the information in the world at high speed so they can react in time to use their own superhuman powers. And of course, like Rayne's ability it would have to be "switchable" so that the vampire could interact with humans. So here's a case where what's essentially a cool game mechanic nonetheless makes a lot of sense on a story level._

_Incidentally, I'm using the BR2 version of Dilated Perception, which burns Rage, rather than the infinite-use BR1 version. On the other hand, the Rage Attack Rayne used in Chapter 4 was pure BR1, which is a classic case of the author wanting to have his cake and eat it, too._


	7. Chapter 7

Riber Haus was eerily deserted as Rayne made her way upwards, her aura sense alert for any signs of life. Obviously the word had gotten out to the GGG staff that it wasn't time to come out and play. Of course, it might just be that Riber only _had_ a handful of lackeys, good mindless minions not being in such generous supply as they had been before the war, but more likely they were being held back for some kind of Plan B. Usually Plan B involved an ambush, probably to catch Rayne in a crossfire from heavy weapons. Still, there was nothing to do but press on.

The first floor of the manor looked like such a house was supposed to look. While the basements had seen extensive renovation, probably during or immediately preceding wartime, the ground floor of Riber Haus had ordinary parlors, sitting rooms, a dining room, extensive kitchens, a library--nothing out of the ordinary at all, in fact, and all of it deserted. She proceeded to the second floor: villains seemed to like either the deepest hole or the highest tower to hang out at.

_And there we have it._

The large room probably had originally been two or three rooms and someone had knocked down walls; the only thing Rayne could imagine needing so much space in a manor house was a ballroom or chapel and those would have been downstairs. The men had mentioned "experiment chambers" as being on a higher floor and these certainly fit the bill. A kind of apparatus like a mutant ceiling fan hung from the roof, great glass orbs on the end of five arms rotating slowly around a central spoke. Blue and yellow sparks flashed within the orbs, and coils of wire snaked across the ceiling from the unit's central pole, then down the walls to seven-foot-tall glass capsules mounted in metal frames along the walls, while a bank of controls at the far end of the room seemed to control the whole thing.

Remembering an earlier mission against the GGG in Argentina, Rayne decided that "mad scientist" had to be one of the qualities the so-called "master race" had been breeding for. There was just no other way to explain how many of the damned things she kept running into.

She wondered if this place was Mittel's, too, or if he'd strictly been into werewolves and it was Hessler, Riber, or somebody not on her target list that was in charge. Then the questions got shoved aside and it was time to get back to business: there was somebody _in_ one of the capsules. _Dianne!_

The blonde woman brightened as soon as she saw Rayne. She said something, but the glass was apparently soundproof. Rayne looked for a way to open the capsule but couldn't find it; the trick must have been hidden in the frame. She flipped a blade out and gestured to Dianne to get back and cover her face, and when the Brimstone agent had, Rayne shattered the glass with one slice. Dianne clambered out of the capsule, glass fragments glittering like rhinestones in her shirt and slacks.

"Not to be ungrateful for the rescue, but you're not the world's most patient person, are you?"

Rayne shrugged.

"We all have our problems."

Dianne brushed glass off herself using her sleeves.

"It was Mittel who brought me here," she said. "Apparently he's been experimenting on himself. I'm fascinated by how he's managed to let common werewolves retain some of their brainpower; the Society would be interested in getting their hands on his notes."

"Well, he won't be needing them, so maybe you can raid his files on the way out."

"He's dead?"

Rayne nodded.

"I was looking for you and found him instead."

"Bad luck for him."

"Very bad." Rayne grinned toothily. "Also bad for Klaus."

"The dhampir?"

"That's the one. He showed up after I'd dealt with Mittel and saved me the trouble of hunting him down."

"You know, I don't get along with my brother, but we don't run around trying to kill one another. What's the deal there?"

"Other than the fact that our father was a psychopathic madman who raped and murdered our respective mothers and my siblings seem to think that was a good thing? For some reason the rest of my family all think that Kagan was the perfect bloodsucking role model and they all want to be just like him. So I'll figure I'll make sure they get what they want: he's dead, and they'll be too. Which is as much personal angst as you're getting from me."

Dianne made a face.

"Good. We don't have near enough time for girl talk. Besides, we've got two more Nazis to deal with, plus someone that Mittel referred to as 'the Commander,' unless he means Riber or Hessler."

"I couldn't guess, but I'm betting against Hessler. He was too far down the GGG ladder to have moved up to the top dog."

"That was ten years ago. Things change."

"Not that much. Not for Mittel, who was an SS colonel, to be taking orders from him. Nor Klaus--dhampir don't take orders from humans without a damned good reason. Now, Riber's a different story. This is his home, after all, which has to mean something, and since he wasn't part of the official apparatus he could be anything from the evil genius behind all this to a rich flunky whose only contribution is cash."

"It sounds like something we ought to check into."

Rayne shrugged.

"Why not? I don't have anything special planned for the rest of the evening."

"Good. I don't suppose you have a spare gun? I feel a little naked without mine, creeping around in a house full of Nazis and werewolves and whatnot without one."

"Try this." She handed Dianne the Bergstein, which she'd picked up on her way out of the lab.

"Oh, yeah, this'll be just fine," Dianne said, competently handling the weapon. She popped the clip and noted the remaining ammunition. "About half empty, though."

"Yeah, well, the guy who used to own it kept wanting to try it out on me. I managed to convince him to stop, but he wasted a bunch of ammo."

Dianne nodded, then replaced the clip and chambered a round.

"Men can be so discourteous that way. I think sometimes chivalry died in the war." She cradled the gun in a two-handed firing position, not having the vampiric strength needed to keep it on target one-handed. "Shall we go?"

"All right. Up, I presume?"

Another nod.

"That sounds about right."

"I don't suppose you have any idea what they intended to do here?" Rayne wondered.

"No, none."

"It must be something big, if it had Brimstone's Munich chapter so spooked--and that they took the time to kill them. Seems to me a little casual renovations would suit this place nicely."

Rayne was thorough in her "renovations"; she left the experiment a room a near-complete wreck when she and Dianne exited. At the least, she hoped the equipment damage would be a setback so if the worst happened it would take them a prohibitive amount of time to restart things. Not that she had any intention of leaving the Nazis in any shape to continue anything, but bad luck did happen.

They went down the hall and up a flight of curving stairs that followed the inside wall of a kind of turret. She'd just stepped out onto the landing when the crimson auras of several lives gave them away. Rayne seized Dianne's shirtfront and hauled them both back into the stairwell, just as two doors crashed open. Gunfire roared out, the staccato beats of automatic weapons firing mixing with the duller sounds of slugs tearing into woodwork.

"Looks like they finally got around to Plan B."

"What?"

"Never mind," Rayne muttered. A well-angled shot tore splinters from the doorjamb about three inches from her face. She retreated back a quarter-turn on the stairs, while Dianne triggered a burst through the door to keep the attackers honest. The window there was wide enough to fit through, but when Rayne looked out she wasn't greeted by the sight of a handy escape route. A kind of walkway with a wooden railing stretched from the tower above across the length of the house to another tower on the opposite side, and four more goons were coming from that direction. What was worse, two were carrying something between them: a fucking _light machine gun_ on a tripod mount. If they got that into play in these restricted quarters then it was all over regardless of how much vampiric speed Rayne used.

"Ah, _shit_! This is going to suck."

"What?"

"Just keep your head down and stay out of the hall until I give the word."

"Okay, but--"

There wasn't any time to explain. Rayne slashed out, not only shattering the glass but tearing the windows themselves out of the frame. She sprang to the sill, measuring the distance in her mind's eye, and jumped, muscles straining as she plunged through the night air, stretching for every inch of distance. Her fingertips just brushed the railing, missing, but then Rayne barely caught the edge of the walkway itself.

She couldn't just hang around, though; the men on the bridge were already shouting, no doubt bringing their guns to bear. Rayne swung herself forward until she could bring her feet up to the underside of the walkway, then kicked off, swinging back around and up through two hundred and seventy degrees. Bullets sprayed around her, but Rayne moved faster than the men could react. Her back hit the railing, and she pivoted up and over, landing on her feet on the walkway five feet in front of the little group. The two unencumbered by the machine gun swung their SMP 34s up, firing, but Rayne was already in motion, flicking her harpoon out at the one on the right while launching a jumping kick at the leftmost one. Her boots thudded home on the goon's face even as she snapped the harpoon like a whip and both Nazis went over opposite sides of the rail. They hit the sharply slanted slate roof below and went skidding down to plunge towards the cliff, their screams fading out as they fell.

The remaining men dropped the machine gun and grabbed for their own SMGs, but Rayne's blades chopped out, tearing easily through unprotected bodies and leaving only two corpses behind. Rayne picked up the machine gun and wrenched away the tripod. She ran down the bridge towards the tower she'd just jumped from and kicked open the door. A half-dozen thugs were there, apparently trying to decide who was going to rush the stairs first.

"Hi, boys. Hope you don't mind that I borrowed this." Rayne patted the Mg-08's barrel, then slammed down the trigger while the men stood in horror. They didn't stare for long, since Rayne burned through the forty-eight-round belt in seconds.

"All right, Dianne; you can come on up."

The blonde woman did, peering out somewhat gingerly. She shuddered at the carnage Rayne had wrought, half a dozen bodies strewn in the corridor that bisected the tower, blood from multiple wounds sprayed everywhere.

"God! I think I'm going to be sick."

"Just think; that's what _they_ wanted to happen to _us_." Rayne waved the exhausted machine gun, then set it down. Without bullets a gun was just a fancy club and her blades worked a hell of a lot better.

"Point taken. Still, I don't know how you deal with it, year after year."

Rayne shrugged. She didn't know, either. Maybe it was because she was half-vampire, the undead brain chemistry altering her attitude towards violence and death. What she did know was that she didn't want to stand around dissecting her psyche in the middle of a kill zone. She scooped up one SMP 34 that didn't have too many bloodstains on it, turned away from Dianne, and went back out onto the bridge.

"Geez, hold up," Dianne muttered, almost mincing between the bodies and the bloodstains. "Touchy, isn't she?"

"You don't know the half of it," Rayne shot back.

"Damn vampire hearing."

No further ambush was waiting on the far side of the walkway. The tower hall was a mirror of the one they'd just come from, only there was only one door opposite the stairs instead of two. Rayne kicked it open, quickly covering the figures inside with her gun. Shock, though, kept her from pulling the trigger, not on Konrad Hessler and not on the man standing behind the huge mahogany desk, the man who was undeniably the "Commander" Dianne had mentioned.

"Damn!" Rayne exclaimed. "It's not everyday I get to kill someone twice, Jurgen Wulf."


	8. Chapter 8

Rayne's wiseass comment was almost a reflex, her instinctive response for dealing with any situation that put her off-guard and through which she regained a measure of psychological control. Inside, she was dumbfounded.

Wulf, damn him, saw right through her. He lifted his cigarette holder to his lips and took a deep drag, smiling thinly the whole time.

"Are you surprised to see me, Agent Rayne?"

"Well, yeah, most of the time when I kill someone they die and that's an end to it. I don't usually get to chat about it with them later."

Wulf chuckled.

"Come now, Rayne. Do you think that I had made such a study of the relics of Beliar all those years without coming to realize their true significance? The ability to imbue one's essence directly into the body so that the living flesh not merely acts as a shell for the soul but becomes one with it. True immortality!"

"So you're saying, what, that you boiled your soul down into your anus, then some other joker shoved it up his ass and you possessed him?"

"Leaving aside your crude attempts at bathroom humor, that describes it quite nicely." He suddenly slammed his fist down on the desk, making knickknacks rattle. "The Thousand-Year Reich destroyed after a mere nine? Intolerable! This will not be permitted!"

"And you're going to change that? Yeaaah, good luck there. I guess being dead for a decade is kinda hard on the sanity, huh?" _Not that he was the mental health poster boy to begin with._

"Oh, but I already have. The means are in my grasp even now."

"Gonna resurrect all the other Nazi buttholes, too?"

Wulf chuckled.

"Oh, please. National Socialism is far, far more than a few men--men who, moreover, were in the end failures. The ideals of Aryan glory will be spread by other hands now, by the Americans and the Soviets, the English and French. Indeed, if one strips out the economic ideology from Russia, Stalin has already made several laudable steps without anyone's help. Likewise, had its leaders gone a different direction--and had the Japanese not made the ludicrous mistake of attacking first--America might well have been an Axis power during the war. Yes, I believe the two surviving world juggernauts will be an excellent place to begin."

Hessler scowled, the expression distorting his bearded face.

"Commander, is this wise?"

"Come on, Hessler, don't you know it's rude to interrupt your boss in the middle of his monologue? Keep it up, Wulf; tell me how you're going to take over the world."

Wulf laughed again, this time deeply and full-throated.

"Ah, Rayne, you amuse me, you truly do. Do you think that I am going on like this because I am a madman who cannot help myself? I do it because it is excruciatingly obvious that one of us will not leave this room, and should that be you, I want you to appreciate the irony before you go."

"I'm just impressed you're willing to admit it might not be me."

Another chuckle.

"Being killed once gives a man a certain...perspective. Now and again a dropped coin can land on its edge. And I certainly knew that _if_ there was any chance that I would be thwarted that it would be your Brimstone Society that accomplished it, so better to settle the matter--to say nothing of old scores--now."

Rayne's eyes narrowed.

"This is sounding dangerously like your next line is 'you've been doing my work for me all along, bwa ha ha ha ha!'"

"Oh, no, no; though after our previous encounter in Louisiana I can certainly see why you might suspect that. No, you've gone and inflicted personal and property damage that will take at least a month to rectify; you may console yourself with that thought. It is more a matter of taking steps along the way."

"Your 'steps' have so far lost you a werewolf doctor, a dhampir, and a dozen or so assorted goons," Rayne pointed out. "I'm not all that impressed."

"Pieces on a board," he dismissed them casually. "Knights and bishops--to say nothing of pawns--do not readily capture the queen. And yet here you are."

She raised the SMP 34 slightly without diverting the aim, calling attention to the fact that aiming point was Wulf's torso.

"You don't have Beliar's ribs anymore, Wulf. That makes you nothing but more meat for the grinder. I wonder how your blood will taste?"

"Threats before you even learn what our plan is?"

Rayne shrugged.

"Yeah, well, I honestly don't much care. If you're dead, then the plan goes away." She pulled the trigger, while her right hand sent the harpoon snapping towards Hessler. The sudden blow from behind snapped her arm up so that the spray of bullets ripped into the ceiling panels. A second blow crashed into her side, sending her flying across the room, crashing through an occasional table and a lamp. The harpoon had gone home, though; she was leashed to Hessler's corpse, the blade impaled through his open mouth.

"Really, Agent Rayne, you don't want to hear about how I intend to replace key leaders in the East and West with _doppelganger_ look-alikes?" Wulf clucked his tongue. "It's fascinating, you know."

The outlines of Dianne Warner's body were rippling and changing. There was for an instant a loathsome plasticity--featureless flesh of sickly green without features, arms and legs flexing like ropes of muscle without bone--and then they settled into the image of Erich Riber.

_Guess that explains why I haven't seen him around._

"Aw, shit. I _liked_ her."

"I am a likeable man," Riber said. "Miss Warner found me so on the train to Munich."

"So when I kill you, I'll be getting revenge for my own illusions, not the real Dianne?"

"Not at all," Wulf chimed in. "When my creations consume a person, they absorb the memories and mannerisms of that person. Otherwise, the imposture would hardly stand up under the slightest scrutiny."

"Thought of everything, have you? Including a way to make the things bulletproof?" Rayne burned through the submachine gun's remaining ammunition, stitching Riber's head and torso with a dozen shots. Each struck home with a wet, pulpy squelching noise, as if the bullets weren't hitting human skin at all. Riber's body rippled, as if a wave had passed through it, and then the bullets popped out, rattling off the floor. "Okay, I guess you have."

Rayne ripped the harpoon free from Hessler and swung her blades out, ready for use. She liked that better, anyway. It was more intimate, more personal than standing halfway across a room and letting a machine do the work of killing. Riber--_was_ it Riber, turned into a monster for the glory of the Reich, or had the creature consumed him, too?--seemed to feel the same way. It had not employed the gun it had carried as Dianne but merely stepped towards Rayne, arms and legs wide. The stance was all wrong for fighting, but Rayne had a feeling that human-form concepts of balance and mobility didn't apply here.

In the next moment it confirmed her suspicion, the body shifting and changing until it took on the hideous shape she'd glimpsed before. The thing's clothes had evidently been part of its transformed flesh, for it was naked, its body a muddy greenish-brown like the scummy, mud-choked waters of a stagnant pond. Its "face" was a complete blank without eyes, nose, mouth, or any other features; its arms were not arms at all but sucker-covered tentacles like a squid's; its legs ended in quivering, splayed pads; and it had no discernable sex. It did, however, have a mouth, a great slit that ran vertically from the hollow of its throat to its waistline, bristling with three-inch fangs and a lolling red tongue tipped with a glistening barb.

"Damn, and I thought the Daemites were disgusting. You haven't lost your touch for finding things that rank high on the ugly meter, Wulf. Hey, there's a plan: maybe you can take over the world while all the sane people are busy retching."

"I tire of this prattle. Dispose of her." Wulf smiled thinly. "I wonder what your precious Brimstone Society will do when their top agent turns on them from within, mm? That will more than repay me for the losses inflicted here."

"I don't think so." Rayne leapt as a tentacle snapped, whiplike, at her, knocking over a chair. "I don't go down easy."

She slashed out, trying to sever one of the tentacles, but it flexed a U shape right where she was trying to cut so that her blade passed through empty air. Its barbed tongue flicked towards her face, spraying spittle, and Rayne jerked back, not wanting any part of what was probably a poisoned stinger.

The doppelganger, she soon found, actually fought intelligently for a monster. Using its long appendages, it kept her back at range, where her only targets for attack were the flexible, highly mobile tongue and tentacles themselves rather than the more vulnerable body. Rayne managed to get in a couple of glancing nicks, but nothing solid. Her frustration was building; the monster's unnatural biology was proving equal to her own speed and other inhuman advantages. Tiny, leechlike mouths in its suckers chittered through their spiraling fangs, laughing at her discomfiture.

Then Rayne made a very bad mistake. With it being all she could do to keep pace with her unnatural opponent, she'd put Jurgen Wulf out of her mind. His new body lacked the relics of Beliar that had given him such supernatural power--they were now locked away in Brimstone's vaults--so Rayne had all but dismissed him as a threat. In truth, the blued-steel Leug pistol he drew from a hip holster _wasn't_ a serious danger, but the several shots he snapped off in her direction were precisely timed, suddenly offering a fourth direction of attack for her to keep track of, and the change was too sudden, catching her off-guard. Her foot slipped just a fraction as she tried to pivot while landing after a jump, and she found herself with the doppelganger's right arm coiling around her, pinning her arms to her sides. The tiny leech-mouths nibbled at her, sucking on her blood or tearing at her leather bustier in search of the tender flesh beneath. Rayne fought against it with all her strength, but it was futile. Like a python, the entwining arm was nothing but raw muscle, imbued with supernatural force and redoubled by each coil wrapped around her. It began to draw her in towards the giant, slobbering maw, its torso seeming to split open to admit its fresh prey. The barbed tongue came up again, ready to sting and strike.

_Damn it! It is _not_ going to end like this, fed to this freakish monster like a doggie biscuit!_ Fury and frustration built upon fear and hate as she struggled futilely, until at last she surrendered to the blood rage and the world seemed suffused in a haze of red.

The blood rage was her at her most elemental, most vampiric state, Rayne's inhuman side let loose to its fullest extent. There was no thought, no science to it, just an unceasing passion to destroy, to rend things apart, to slash them, bleed them, to kill. Sometimes it scared her, letting that piece of Kagan inside her out into the world, but she used it, too, and often. Within the rage she was at her strongest, her fastest, her most lethal.

Strong enough to break the doppelganger's grip? No, not that strong. But Rayne's rage-clouded mind, consumed only with the urge to tear and destroy this _thing_, saw what she hadn't before: while it still held her, so too was the arm fixed in place compared to her body, and while her arms were held fast, her legs were not.

Thought and action were one, the urge to kill demanding that the opening be taken instantly. Her hip torqued at a tendon-straining angle with titanic force, ripping the sharp spike of her heel into rubbery flesh, ripping, tearing, until a gout of some stinking ichor that served the thing for blood spewed from the stump and Rayne fell to the floor, still wrapped in the severed arm. The monster screamed in agony that thrilled Rayne's soul as she slipped from its slackening coils. It flailed out with its other arm, but it wasn't fighting, just a wounded beast thrashing in pain. Her blades rose and fell, hacking and chopping it apart, tearing and impaling the thing until it lay in twitching chunks on the floor that pulsed, throbbed, and finally lay still in death.

Spent, the rage fell away from her and Rayne swayed and nearly fell with the loss of its sustaining energy. She'd been weakened by the fight, but there was still one source of strength left.

"Nice try, Wulf, but gee, it looks like it's down to you and me again." With the rage gone, she felt every bruise, every bite the doppelganger had inflicted, and she wasn't interested in pushing the banter much further. "And now it's going to be just me."

She leapt for him, arms outstretched. He reacted quickly, snapping off two quick shots that punched through her abdomen, but Rayne kept right on going. He blocked her first grab for him, but she got a hold of his arm, swung around behind him, and hooked his ankle, tripping him so she could push him down on the desk.

"This...isn't...over," Wulf gagged out.

"Yes it is," Rayne purred in his ear, then buried her fangs in his neck. Possessed and reshaped by Wulf's spirit or not, the body was a living human one, and its blood was hot and sweet. Moaning, Rayne guzzled greedily, giving herself over to the feeding, able to give it her complete attention without any other distractions. When she was finished, Jurgen Wulf was nothing but a withered husk.

"That's twice now," she told the dead man. "Let's hope that even someone stupid enough to be a Nazi can take the hint."

She was about to drop the corpse again, but noticed with some surprise and disgust that with the jaw sagging open in death, she could see Wulf's tongue. It was swollen and black, and it continued to wriggle like a living thing.

"Well, well. Looks like I just found that relic." She snapped open a blade, then sliced down, bisecting the corpse's skull from crown to collarbone. The tongue, sliced in two, seemed to squeal, vibrating against the air, then burst into flame and was ash in seconds.

Rayne dropped the corpse, then stopped and thought again. Wulf was a smoker, and she found a matchbox in one pocket. A few here, a few there, and the tower room was thoroughly ablaze when she left it. By dawn, she figured Riber Haus would be a complete loss.

Her life had one ghost in it already, the hate for her father that had shaped almost every major choice she'd made. She didn't need any more.


End file.
